A triumphant recasting, Franz Ferdinand's Always Ascending is as exuberant as it is euphoric, bursting with fresh ideas born of what Alex Kapranos calls "aggressive sonic experimentation." With the ...

Over their almost decade-and-a-half career, multi-faceted rock minimalists The Kills have released four records, each one a restless, reckless enigmatic art statement that bristled with tension, anxiety, sex, unstudied cool and winking ennui. Yet not one of them sounded like the previous one. “In an effort to not repeat ourselves, the path of least resistance has never been ours. Change is uneasy. Art should be uneasy”, says Alison Mosshart, sitting at a long wooden table in her rented house above Los Angeles’ Griffith Park, where she’s been residing for a month, right next door to her musical partner Jamie...